LITERARY THEORY

◼ Literary Criticism helps readers

understand a text in relation to the author,
culture, and other texts.
The Most Common Critical Stances

◼ Timeline (most of these overlap)

◼ Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
◼ Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
◼ Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
◼ Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
◼ Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
◼ Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
◼ Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
◼ Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
◼ Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)
◼ New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
◼ Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
 ARISTOTLE

Questions first posed by Plato and Aristotle are still of

prime concern, and every critic who has attempted to
justify the social value of literature has had to come to
terms with the opposing argument made by Plato in The
Republic.
The poet as a man and poetry as a form of statement both
seemed untrustworthy to Plato, who depicted the physical
world as an imperfect copy of transcendent ideas and
poetry as a mere copy of the copy.
Thus, literature could only mislead the seeker of
truth. Plato credited the poet with divine
inspiration, but this, too, was cause for worry; a
man possessed by such madness would subvert
the interests of a rational polity. Poets were
therefore to be banished from the hypothetical
republic.
In his Poetics—still the most respected of all discussions of literature—
Aristotle countered Plato’s indictment by stressing what is normal and
useful about literary art. The tragic poet is not so much divinely inspired
as he is motivated by a universal human need to imitate, and what he
imitates is not something like a bed (Plato’s example) but a noble
action. Such imitation presumably has a civilizing value for those who
empathize with it
◼ Tragedy does arouse emotions of pity and
terror in its audience, but these emotions are
purged in the process (katharsis). In this
fashion Aristotle succeeded in portraying
literature as satisfying and regulating human
passions instead of inflaming them.
Aristotle’s practical contribution to criticism, as opposed
to his ethical defense of literature, lies in his inductive
treatment of the elements and kinds of poetry. Poetic
modes are identified according to their means of
imitation, the actions they imitate, the manner of
imitation, and its effects. These distinctions assist the
critic in judging each mode according to its proper ends
instead of regarding beauty as a fixed entity. The ends
of tragedy, as Aristotle conceived them, are best served
by the harmonious disposition of six elements: plot,
character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song.
 Neoclassicism 1660 - 1789

◼ Famous Neoclassical writers:

- John Dryden
- Alexander Pope
- Jonathan Swift
- Samuel Johnson
- Oliver Goldsmith
Main Tenets of Neoclassicism:

Strong traditionalism often joined to a distrust

of radical innovation and was evidenced
above all in their great respect for classical
writers—i.e., writers of ancient Greece and
Rome.
One of the last truly international European
aesthetic movements, neoclassicism left
virtually no aspect of visual culture untouched.

Neoclassicism was perceived by 18th-century

critics as a revolutionary rejection of the
decadence of the baroque that had held sway
since the early 17th century.
In addition to its formal stylistic characteristics,
which include a propensity toward the emulation
of ancient Greco-Roman art and an emphasis
on dignity, restraint, and grandeur of scale,
neoclassical art was often endowed with an
ideological imperative. Seeking to reform society
from above, many neoclassicists enlisted
ancient virtue, morality, and ethics as antidotes
to what they considered to be the frivolity,
licentiousness, and sybaritic luxury of
Neoclassicism so attained a utopian thrust that was
exploited in the interest of political, social, economic,
and spiritual reform.
The antique panacea was offered to an ailing Europe
for such perceived ills as obscurantism, religious
fanaticism, superstition, and social inequality.
It was the rationalist basis of neoclassicism that so
appealed to progressive Enlightenment thought and
that led proponents of the French Revolution to
embrace it for regimist purposes.
For the sake of convenience the Neoclassic period can be divided
into three relatively coherent parts:
The Restoration Age (1660-1700) --h Milton, Bunyan, and
Dryden were the dominant influences

The Augustan Age (1700-1750) --Pope was the central poetic

figure, while Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were
presiding over the sophistication of the novel

The Age of Johnson(1750-1798)

 THE AGE OF JOHNSON

◼ It was dominated and characterized by the

mind and personality of the inimitable Dr.
Samuel Johnson, whose sympathies were
with the fading Augustan past
◼ saw the beginnings of a new understanding
and appreciation of the work of Shakespeare,
of the novel of sensibility,
◼ the emergence of the Gothic school —
◼ These are attitudes which, in the context of
the development of a cult of Nature, the
influence of German romantic thought,
religious tendencies like the rise of
Methodism, and political events like the
American and French revolutions —
established the intellectual and emotional
foundations of English Romanticism.
◼ Literature was conceived to be primarily an
“art”; that is, a set of skills which, though it
requires innate talents, must by perfected by
long study and practice and consists in the
deliberate adaptation of known and tested
means.
◼ Human beings were regarded as the primary
subject matter of literature. Poetry was held
to be an imitation of human life— “a mirror
held up to nature.” Poetry is thus designed to
yield both instruction and aesthetic pleasure
for readers. Not art for art’s sake, but art for
humanity’s sake
Emphasis was placed on what human beings
possess in common—representative
characteristics and widely shared
experiences, thoughts, feelings, and tastes.
◼ Pope: “what oft was thought but ne’er so
well expressed”
To a certain extent Neoclassicism represented a reaction
against the optimistic, exuberant, and enthusiastic
Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good
and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and
intellectual growth. Neoclassical theorists, by contrast,
saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose
potential was limited.
◼ They replaced the Renaissance emphasis on
the imagination, on invention and
experimentation, and on mysticism with an
emphasis on order and reason, on restraint,
on common sense, and on religious, political,
economic and philosophical conservatism.
◼ They maintained that man himself was the
most appropriate subject of art, and saw art
itself as essentially pragmatic — as valuable
because it was somehow useful — and as
something which was properly intellectual
rather than emotional.
 Popular Genres

Prose literary forms :essay, the letter, the

satire, the parody, the burlesque, and the moral
fable
Poetry :the rhymed couplet, which reached its
greatest sophistication in heroic couplet of Pope;
Theatre: heroic drama, the melodrama, the
sentimental comedy, and the comedy of
manners.
Romanticism: 19 th century
◼ Famous Romantic writers:
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Blake
- John Keats
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Mary Shelley
By Casper Friedrich 1818
TENETS OF ROMANTICISM

◼ Imagination
◼ Intuition
◼ Idealism
◼ Inspiration
◼ Individuality
 Imagination
- Imagination was emphasized over
“reason.”
- This was a backlash against the
rationalism characterized by the
Neoclassical period or “Age of Reason.”
- Imagination was considered necessary for
creating all art.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge called it
“intellectual intuition.”
 Intuition
- Romantics placed value on “intuition,” or
feeling and instincts, over reason.
- Emotions were important in Romantic art.
- Poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings.”
Idealism is the concept that we can make
the world a better place.
- Idealism refers to any theory that
emphasizes the spirit, the mind, or
language over matter.
- Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher,
held that the mind forces the world we
perceive to take the shape of space-and-
time.
 Inspiration

- The Romantic artist, musician, or writer, is an

“inspired creator” rather than a “technical
master.”
- What this means is “going with the moment”
or being spontaneous, rather than “getting it
precise.”
 Individuality

- Romantics celebrated the individual.

- Walt Whitman, a later Romantic writer, wrote

a poem titled “Song of Myself”: it begins, “I
celebrate myself…”
Reasons for desiring Individuality

◼ The high currency placed upon originality in

Coleridge’s late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century context was a reaction against the
advent of mass production that spread through
Europe with the industrial revolution. An
unoriginal poem was thus compared to the
unthinking production of a machine
◼ The second contextual influence upon the
Romantics’ ideal of originality is a sense of
‘identity crisis’, where the human soul must
struggle for relevance in a society filled with
machines. As the machine like existence of
factory workers becomes a reality the fear of
losing humanity’s intellectual and spiritual
faculties becomes heightened.
◼ A third reason was the heightened awareness
of the rise of mass-culture. They were acutely
aware of what Walter Jackson Bate terms
‘the burden of the past’, which poses a
question that, as time passes, grows
increasingly difficult to answer: ‘What is there
left to do?”
The increased capacity to preserve and
distribute past works means that poetic
achievements are ‘constantly multiplying in
an eternal present’.
Romantics were more intensively concerned
with the impossibility of avoiding repetition
and imitation than any preceding literary
generation.
McFarland effectively expresses this attitude
towards originality in market terms: ‘as the
available commodity became scarcer, so
demand grew proportionally more urgent.’
Formalism
◼ A formalist (New Criticism) reading of a text
focuses on symbol, metaphor and imagery.
◼ Formalism ignores the author’s biography
and focuses only on the interaction of literary
elements within the text.
◼ Typical questions:
◼ How are the various parts of the work interconnected?
◼ How do paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension work in the text?
◼ How does the author resolve apparent contradictions within the
work?
◼ What does the form of the work say about its content?
◼ Is there a central or focal passage that can be said to sum up the
entirety of the work?
◼ How do the rhythms and/or rhyme schemes of a poem contribute
to the meaning or effect of the piece?
◼ Russian Formalism
◼ Victor Shklovsky
◼ Roman Jakobson
◼ Victor Erlich - Russian Formalism: History -
Doctrine, 1955
◼ Yuri Tynyanov
Russian Formalism 1915

◼ Focused the study of literariness: the sum of

'devices' that distinguish literary language from
ordinary language.
◼ Defamiliarization: instead of seeing literature as a
'reflection' of the world Shklovsky and his Formalist
followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation; 'making
strange'.
◼ Plot (syuazhet) and story (fabula)
◼ They disregarded the contents of the work, and so
invited disapproval from the Marxists
◼ Initially focused on poetry.
◼ Their only concern is the form of a literary
work, in order to read the deep meaning of
the text.
◼ Not interested in the social function of
literature.
◼ They ignore the referential function (the old
Aristotelian mimesis concept)
◼ They believed literature is autonomous from the
rest of reality.
◼ Highly interested in deciphering the way in which
literature functions.
❑ Defamiliarizing of common language (R. Jakobson)
❑ Narrative construction (Slovski, Propp)
❑ Stylistic devices (Vinogradov)
❑ Dialectics of genres (Tanianov)
❑ Thematic structures (Tomasevski
◼ The literariness or artfulness of a work of
literature, that which makes it an aesthetic
object, resides entirely in its devices, which
should form the sole object of literary studies.
Works of art are assemblages of materials
and devices, writers are craftsmen using
devices to create certain effects, and
scholars should single out the devices and
explain their structure and aesthetic functioning
◼ The aesthetic value or purpose of art,
embodied in the devices, consists in creating
in readers a heightened awareness, making
them see things anew.
This is achieved through disrupting the familiar,
automatic perception habits as regarding
literature, language, or reality and
(re)creating instead novelty or strangeness.
◼ Natural language is defamiliarized through
figures of sound and sense, such as meter
and wordplay, and worn-out literary
conventions through depriving them of their
motivation, "laying them bare, " so to speak,
and parodying them.
◼ Our habitual perception of reality is disrupted
through distorting the temporal and causal
order of events and the logical order of
information and by seeing the familiar from a
nonstandard perspective such as that of an
outsider, a child, or a deranged person.
Key Methodological Principles

◼ Defining phenomena notinherently but in a

relative contrastive manner: practical versus
poetic language, verse versus prose
◼ Adopting a functional, or means-end,
approach to explain the specific nature of
phenomena: “what is their role and intended
effect in the system in which they occur?”
◼ Describing and explaining the nature and
change of literary phenomena in specifically
literary terms .
◼ Proceeding in concentric circles from literature to
other kinds of discourse and only then to
broader cultural and social series. Once
changes in the literary system have been
described, they can be correlated to changes in
other cultural series, but they cannot be reduced
to them
New Criticism

◼ John Crowe Ransom

◼ I.A. Richards
◼ William Empson
◼ T.S. Eliot
◼ Allen Tate
◼ Cleanth Brooks
◼ Close reading of the work itself.
◼ Incorporating Formalism it examines the
relationship between what a text says and the
way it says it. New Critics "may find tension,
irony, or paradox in this relation, but they
usually resolve it into unity and coherence of
meaning"
◼ They attacked the romantic fallacy that literature
flows from a noble soul.
◼ New Critics insist that the meaning of a text is
intrinsic and should not be confused with the
author's intentions nor its impressionistic effects on
the reader. The "intentional fallacy" is when one
confuses the meaning of a work with the author's
purported intention (expressed in letters, diaries).
The "affective fallacy" is the practice of interpreting
texts according to the psychological or emotional
responses of readers
Neo-Aristotelianism or The Chicago
School of Criticism
◼ R.S. Crane
◼ Elder Olson
◼ Norman Maclean
◼ W.R. Keast
◼ Wayne C. Booth
◼ Began at the University of Chicago , also called Neo
Aristotleanism, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts
of plot, character and genre.

◼ A reaction to New Criticism which was felt to be giving too much

importance to figurative language. They aimed instead for total
objectivity, and a strong classical basis The Chicago School
considered language and diction as merely the building material
of poetry.

◼ They valued the structure or form of a literary work as a whole,

rather than the complexities of the language.
Psychoanalytic Criticism
1930’s
◼ Sigmund Freud
◼ Jung
◼ Harold Bloom
◼ Peter Brooks
◼ Jacque Lacan
◼ Jane Gallop
◼ Julia Kristeva
◼ Marshall Alcorn
◼ The Unconscious and the Desires
◼ Id, Ego, and Superego
◼ Freud maintained that our desires and our
unconscious conflicts give rise to three areas of the
mind that wrestle for dominance as we grow from
infancy, to childhood, to adulthood:
◼ Id - libido
◼ Ego - "...one of the major defenses against the
power of the drives..."
◼ Superego - the area of the unconscious that
houses Judgment.
Typical questions:

◼ How do the operations of repression structure or inform the work?

◼ Are there any oedipal dynamics - or any other family dynamics - are
work here?
◼ How can characters' behaviour, narrative events, and/or images be
explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts of any kind?
◼ What does the work suggest about the psychological being of its
author?
◼ What might a given interpretation of a literary work suggest about the
psychological motives of the reader?
◼ Are there prominent words in the piece that could have different or
hidden meanings? Could there be a subconscious reason for the author
using these "problem words"?
 Carl Jung

◼ Explores the connection between literature and the “collective

unconscious” of the human race: racial memory. Jungian criticism,
related to Freudian theory because of its connection to psychoanalysis,
assumes that all stories and symbols are based on mythic models from
mankind’s past.
◼ Typical questions:
◼ What connections can we make between elements of the text and the
archetypes? (Mask, Shadow, Anima, Animus)
◼ How do the characters in the text mirror the archetypal figures? (Great
Mother or nurturing Mother, Whore, destroying Crone, Lover,
Destroying Angel)
◼ How does the text mirror the archetypal narrative patterns? (Quest,
Night-Sea-Journey)
◼ Does the “hero” embark on a journey in either a physical or spiritual
sense?
◼ Is there a journey to an underworld or land of the dead?
Marxist Criticism 1930s

◼ Karl Marx - (with Friedrich Engels) The Communist

Manifesto,
◼ Georg Lukács
◼ Walter Benjamin
◼ Theodor W. Adorno
◼ Louis Althusser
◼ Terry Eagleton
◼ Frederic Jameson
◼ Jürgen Habermas
◼ The Material Dialectic: Historical changes are caused by the material
realities of the economic base of society. The ideological superstructure
of politics, law, philosophy, religion, and art is built upon that economic
base

◼ This cycle of contradiction, tension, and revolution must continue: there

will always be conflict between the upper, middle, and working classes
and this conflict will be reflected in art

The Revolution
◼ The conflict between the classes will lead to revolution by oppressed
peoples and form the groundwork for a new order of society where
capitalism is abolished
Typical questions:

◼ What is the social class of the author?

◼ Which class does the work claim to represent?
◼ What values does it reinforce?
◼ What values does it subvert?
◼ What social classes do the characters represent?
 Commodity Fetish

◼ For Marx any object moves from its

materiality (example of a wooden table
beyond its use-value (to put things on) into
the realm of exchange-value (shifting
indexes of prices and all the attendant
politics). Arriving between these is the
commodity fetish.
◼ "A commodity appears at first sight an
extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its
analysis brings out that it is a very strange
thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties
and theological niceties". Fetishism in
anthropology refers to the primitive belief that
godly powers can inhere in inanimate things
(e.g., in totems).
◼
◼ The commodity remains simple as long as it
is tied to its use value. When a piece of wood
is turned into a table through human labour,
its use value is clear and, as product, the
table remains tied to its material use.
However, as soon as the table "emerges as
a commodity it changes into a thing which
transcends sensuousness".
◼ People in a capitalist society thus begin to
treat commodities as if value inhered in the
objects themselves, rather than in the amount
of real labour expended to produce the
object.
◼ The connection to the actual hands of the
labourer is severed as soon as the table is
connected to money as the universal
equivalent for exchange.
◼ In capitalist society, gold and then paper
money become "the direct incarnation of all
human labour" , much as in primitive
societies the totem becomes the direct
incarnation of godhead. Men are henceforth
related to each other in their social process of
production in a purely atomistic way; they
become alienated because their own
relations of production assume a material
shape which is independent of their control
◼ The term reification is also important here. In
consumer societies, what used to be relations
between people, become reified in objects...
This is one aspect of the commodity fetish.
◼ Marx uses fetish ironically to refer to
anthropological interest in fetish in primitive
societies… this is our tribal system...
‘modernism’ does not escape this…
Historical Materialism

◼ Marx identifies ‘history’ as the history of

the victors (i.e. great victories in terms of
state processions, great monuments,
monarchs, etc). In historical materialism
he elaborates how his view of history
arises from the base and superstructure,
i.e., out of the material conditions of
existence as produced by the proleteriat.
◼ History is made by man, not god or ‘destiny’ and
the role of the working classes is erased by the
violence of battles, statues, civic marches,
Royalist spectacle, etc.
The History of Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School for Social Research was set up in 1923.

◼ Left-wing German, Jewish intellectuals.
◼ Upper and middle class of German society.

◼ The rise of Nazi Party to power in Germany; racist

oppression of Jews; totalitarian repression of the left in
1930s meant that members of the school were forced
to flee to other parts of Europe and North America.
Thinkers of Frankfurt School

◼ Theodor Adorno, 1903-1970.

◼ Max Horkheimer, 1895-1973.
◼ Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1978.
◼ Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940.
Functions of the Frankfurt School

◼ Development of critical theory and research draws

extensively upon Marxist Theory
◼ This involves intellectual work which aimed to reveal
the social contradictions underlying the emergent
capitalist societies of the time and their typical
ideological frameworks in order to construct a
theoretical critique of modern capitalism.
Theory of Commodity Fetishism

◼ Adorno wrote that the real secret of success is

the mere reflection of what one pays in the
market for the product. The consumer is really
worshipping the money that he himself has paid
for the ticket to the Toscanini concert.
◼ The Frankfurt sees the durability in
capitalism others have doubted, and
argues that this rests upon affluence and
consumerism, and the more rational
and pervasive forms of social control
afforded by the modern state, mass media
and popular culture.
Concept of False Needs

◼ False needs created can be fulfilled at the

expense of the true needs which remain
unsatisfied in light of consumerism and
commodity fetishism.
◼ The School views the culture industry ensuring
the creation and satisfaction of false needs, and
the suppression of true needs.So that the
working-class is no longer likely to pose a threat
to the stabilityof capitalism.
 Culture Industry

◼ It moulds their consciousness by

inculcating the desire for false needs. It
works to exclude real needs, alternative
and radical concepts, and politically
oppositional ways of thinking and acting.
◼ The customer is not king but the object.
Reader-Response Criticism1960s

◼ Peter Rabinowitz
◼ Stanley Fish
◼ Elizabeth Freund
◼ David Bleich
◼ Norman Holland
◼ Louise Rosenblatt
◼ Wolfgang Iser
◼ Hans Rober Jaus
◼ Focused on finding meaning in the act of reading
itself and examining the ways individual readers or
communities of readers experience texts. These
critics raise theoretical questions regarding how the
reader joins with the author "to help the text mean."
◼ Reader-response criticism plunges into what the
New Critics called the affective fallacy: what do texts
do in the minds of the readers? In fact, a text can
exist only as activated by the mind of the reader.
◼ Wayne Booth uses the phrase the implied
reader to mean the reader "created by the
work." Iser also uses the term the implied
reader but substitutes the educated
reader for what Fish calls the intended
reader.
Typical questions:

◼ How does the interaction of text and reader create

meaning?
◼ Do the sounds/shapes of the words as they appear
on the page or how they are spoken by the reader
enhance or change the meaning of the word/work?

◼ What does the body of criticism published about a

literary text suggest about the critics who interpreted
that text and/or about the reading experience
produced by that text?
Structuralism and Semiotics1920s

◼ Charles Sanders Peirce

◼ Ferdinand de Saussure
◼ Claude Lévi-Strauss
◼ Northrop Frye
◼ Noam Chomsky
◼ Roland Barthes
◼ Language exists in patterns, certain
underlying elements are common to all
human experiences.
◼ If you examine the structure of a large
number of short stories to discover the
underlying principles that govern their
composition, narrative progression or of
characterization you are engaged in
structuralist activity.
Northrop Frye

◼ Genres of Western literature fall into four mythoi

theory of modes, or historical criticism (tragic, comic,
and thematic);
◼ theory of symbols, or ethical criticism
(literal/descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic);
◼ theory of myths, or archetypal criticism (comedy,
romance, tragedy, irony/satire);
◼ theory of genres, or rhetorical criticism (epos, prose,
drama, lyric)
Peirce and Saussure

◼ Iconic signs: the signifier resembles the thing

signified such as the stick figures on washroom
doors that signify 'Men' or 'Women';
◼ Indexes: the signifier is a reliable indicator of the
presence of the signified (like fire and smoke);
◼ True Symbols, in which the signifier's relation to the
thing signified is completely arbitrary and
conventional (Cat)
◼ Saussure is one of the most influential figures
in linguistics. His view of linguistics
considered as ‘new’ because of its difference
with traditional linguistics i.e. historical
linguistics. It is consisted of the study of
phonology principal, structural and historical
linguistics, etc.
◼ Leonard Bloomfield, Charles Francis Hockett,
Andre Martinet, Edward Sapir
◼ Saussure’s idea of the linguistic sign is a
seminal concept in all structuralist and
poststructuralist discourses. According to
him, language is not a naming process by
which things get associated with a word or
name.
◼ The linguistic sign is made of the union of
“signifier” (sound image, or “psychological
imprint of sound”) and “signified” (concept). In
this triadic view, words are “unmotivated
signs,” as there is no inherent connection
between a name (signifier) and what it
designates (signified).
◼ Saussure’s theory of language emphasizes
that meanings are arbitrary and relational
(illustrated by the reference to 8.25 Geneva
to Paris Express in Course in General
Linguistics; the paradigmatic chain hovel-
shed-hut-house-mansion-palace, where the
meaning of each is dependent upon its
position in the chain; and the dyads male-
female, day-night etc. where each unit can be
defined only in terms of its opposite).
◼ Saussurean theory establishes that human
being or reality is not central; it is language
that constitutes the world.
◼ Saussure employed a number of binary
oppositions in his lectures, an important one
being speech/writing. Saussure gives
primacy to speech, as it guarantees
subjectivity and presence, whereas writing,
he asserted, denotes absence, of the
speaker as well as the signified. Derrida
critiqued this as phonocentrism that unduly
privileges presence over absence, which led
him to question the validity of all centres.
◼ Langue (language as a system) and Parole
an individual utterance in that language,
which is inferior to Langue) gave
structuralists a way of thinking about the
larger structures of literature. Structuralist
narratology, espoused by Propp, Todorov,
Barthes and Genette illustrates how a story’s
meaning develops from its overall structure,
(langue) rather than from each individual
story’s isolated theme (parole).
◼ To ascertain a text’s meaning, narratologists
emphasize grammatical elements such as
verb tenses and the relationships and
configurations of figures of speech within the
story. This demonstrates the structuralist shift
from authorial intention to broader impersonal
Iinguistic structures in which the author’s text
(a term preferred over “work”) participates.
◼ Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving
the world in terms of structures. First seen in the work of
the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary
critic Roland Barthes, the essence of Structuralism is the
belief that “things cannot be understood in isolation, they
have to be seen in the context of larger structures they
are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do not exist
by themselves, but are formed by our way of perceiving
the world.
◼ In structuralist criticism, consequently, there
is a constant movement away from the
interpretation of the individual literary work
towards understanding the larger structures
which contain them. For example, the
structuralist analysis of Donne‘s poem Good
Morrow demands more focus on the relevant
genre (alba or dawn song), the concept of
courtly love, etc rather than on the close
reading of the formal elements of the text.
◼
◼ other major practitioners include A. J.
Greimas, Vladimir Propp, Terence Hawkes
(Structuralism and Semiotics), Robert
Scholes (Structuralism in Literature), Colin
MacCabe, Frank Kermode and David Lodge
Working with Structuralism). The American
structuralists were Jonathan Culler and the
semioticians C. S. Peirce, Charles Morris and
Chomsky.
◼
◼ Structuralists believe that the underlying
structures which organize rules and units into
meaningful systems are generated by the
human mind itself and not by sense
perception. Structuralism tries to reduce the
complexity of human experiences to certain
underlying structures which are universal, an
idea which has its roots in the classicists like
Aristotle who identified simple structures as
forming the basis of life
◼ A structure can be defined as any conceptual
system that has three properties: “wholeness”
(the system should function as a whole),
“transformation” (system should not be
static), and “self-regulation (the basic
structure should not be changed).
◼ With its penchant for scientific categorization,
Structuralism suggests the interrelationship
between “units” (surface phenomena) and
“rules” (the ways in which units can be put
together). In language, units are words and
rules are the forms of grammar which order
words.
◼
◼ The fundamental belief of Structuralism, that
all human activities are constructed and not
natural or essential, pervades all seminal
works of Structuralism.
◼ . A structure can be defined as any
conceptual system that has three properties:
“wholeness” (the system should function as a
whole), “transformation” (system should not
be static), and “self-regulation (the basic
structure should not be changed).
Semiology

◼ A word’s meaning derives from its difference

from other words in the sign system of
language (eg: rain not brain or sprain). All
signs are cultural constructs that have taken
on their meaning through repeated, learned,
collective use. The process of communication
is an unending chain of sign production which
Peirce dubbed “unlimited semiosis”.
◼ The distinctions of symbolic, iconic and
indexical signs, introduced by the literary
theorist Charles Sande Peirce is also a
significant idea in Semiology. The other major
concepts associated with semiotics are
“denotation” (first order signification) and
“connotation” (second order signification).
Myth Criticism

◼ Structuralism was anticipated by the Myth

Criticism of Frye, Richard Chase, Leslie
Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright
and others which drew upon anthropological
and physiological bases of myths, rituals and
folk tales to restore spiritual content to the
alienated fragmented world ruled by
scientism, empiricism and technology. Myth
criticism sees literature as a system based or
recurrent patterns.
Claude Levi-Strauss

◼ The French social anthropologist applied the

structuralist outlook to cultural phenomena
like mythology, kinship relations and food
preparation. He applied the principles of
langue and parole in his search for the
fundamental mental structures of the human
mind. Myths seem fantastic and arbitrary yet
myths from different cultures are similar.
Hence he concluded there must be universal
laws that govern myths (and all human
thought).
◼ Myths consist of
◼ 1) elements that oppose or contradict each
other
◼ 2) other elements that “mediate” or resolve
those oppositions (such as trickster / Raven/
Coyote, uniting herbivores and carnivores).
He breaks myths into smallest meaningful
units called mythemes.
◼ Strauss: every culture can be understood, in
terms of the binary oppositions like high/low,
life/death an idea which he drew from the
philosophy of Hegel who explains that in
every situation there are two opposing things
and their resolution, which he called “thesis,
antithesis and synthesis”. Strauss showed
how opposing ideas would fight and be
resolved in the rules of marriage, in
mythology, and in ritual.
◼
◼ In interpreting the Oedipus myth he placed
the individual story of Oedipus within the
context of the whole cycle of tales connected
with the city of Thebes. He then identifies
repeated motifs and contrasts, which he used
as the basis of his interpretation. In this
method, the story and the cycle part are
reconstituted in terms of binary oppositions
like animal/ human, relation/stranger,
husband/son ...
◼ Concrete details from the story are seen in
the context of a larger structure and the
larger structure is then seen as an overall
network of basic dyadic pairs which have
obvious symbolic, thematic and archetypal
resonance. This is the typical structuralist
process of moving from the particular to the
general placing the individual work within a
wider structural content.
◼ A very complex binary opposition introduced
by Levi-Strauss is that of bricoleur (“savage
mind”) and an engineer (true craft man with a
scientific mind). According to him, mythology
functions more like a bricoleur, whereas
modern western science works more like an
engineer (the status of modem science is
ambivalent in his writings).
◼ In Levi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, what
is important is that the signs already in
existence are used for purposes that they
were not originally meant for. When a faucet
breaks, the bricoleur stops the leak using a
cloth, which is not actually meant for it. On
the other hand the engineer foresees the
eventuality and he would have either a spare
faucet or all the spanners and bolts
necessary to repair the tap.
◼ Roland Barthes, the other major figure in the
early phase of structuralism (later he turned
to Post Structuralism), applied the
structuralist analysis and semiology to broad
cultural phenomena. His work embodies
transition from structuralist to poststructuralist
perspectives. Certain works of his have a
Marxist perspective and some others deal
with the concept of intertextuality, a coinage
by his student and associate Julia Kristeva.
BARTHES

◼ In Mythologies he examines modern France

It is an ideological critique of products of
mass bourgeois culture, like soaps,
advertisements, images of Rome etc., which
are explained using the concept of ‘myth’.
According to Barthes, myth is a language, a
mode of signification. He reiterates
Saussure’s view that semiology comprises
three terms: signifier, signified and sign, in
which sign is a relation between the signifier
and signified..
◼ The structure of myth repeats this tri-
dimensional pattern. Myth is a second order
signifying system illustrated by the image of
the young Negro in a French uniform saluting
the french flag, published as the cover page
of the Parisian magazine, Paris Match, which
reveals the myth of French imperialism at the
connotative level
◼ Barthes underlies that the very principle of
myth is “to transform history into nature”.
Ideology and culture as kinds of propaganda
work best when they are not recognized as
such because they contribute to the
construction of what people think of as
“common sense.”
◼ Barthes‘ Death of the Author (1968) reveals
his deconstructionist and antihumanist
approach as it deposes the Romantic idea of
an author, symbolically male and end of all
meanings. The death of the author is followed
by the birth of the reader; not just the reader
but the scriptor, an idea which has echoes of
Eliot’s theory of impersonality.
◼ In his S/Z (which sits on the fence between
structuralism and poststructuralism) method
of analysis is to divide the story (Balzac’s
Sarrasine) into 561 units of meaning, which
he classifies using five ‘codes’: Proairetic,
hermeneutic, cultural, semic and symbolic,
seeing these as the basic underlying
structure of all narratives. In this book
appears the substantial reference to the
readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptable) texts
◼ . In The Pleasure of the Text he distinguishes
between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance
(bliss).
◼ The complexity and heterogeneity of
structuralism, which is reflected even in the
architecture of this period (eg., structuralist
artefacts like Berlin Holocaust Memorial,
Bank of China Tower, etc) paved the way to
poststructuralism which attacked the
essentialist premises of structuralism..
◼ Poststructuralism argues that in the very
examination of underlying structures, a series
of biases are involved. Structuralism has
often been criticized for being ahistorical and
for favouring deterministic structural forces
over the ability of people to act
◼ As the political turbulence of the 1960s and
1970s (especially the student uprising of May
1968) began affecting the academy, issues of
power and political struggle moved to the
centre of people’s attention. In the 1980s
deconstruction and its emphasis on the
fundamental ambiguity of language—rather
than its crystalline logical structure—became
popular, which proved fatal to structuralism.
Typical questions:

◼ What patterns exist within the text that make it a part

of other works like it?
◼ What patterns exist within the text that make it a
product of a larger culture?
◼ What patterns exist within the text that connect it to
the larger "human" experience?
◼ What are the semiotics of a given category of
cultural phenomena, or 'text,' such as high-school
football games, television and/or magazine ads for a
particular brand ?
Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction,
1966
◼ Immanuel Kant
◼ Friedrich Nietzsche
◼ Jacques Derrida
◼ Roland Barthes
◼ Deleuze and Guattari
◼ Jean-François Lyotard
◼ Michele Foucault
◼ Stephen Toulmin
◼ Martin Heidegger
◼ Paul Cilliers
◼ Ihab Hassan
◼ Post-structuralism holds that there are many
truths, that frameworks must bleed, and that
structures must become decentered.
◼ It is also concerned with the power structures
or hegemonies and how these elements
enforce hierarchy.
◼ By questioning the process of developing meaning,
post-structural theory strikes at the very heart of
philosophy and reality and throws knowledge
making into what Derrida called "freeplay”.
◼ If we cannot trust language systems to convey truth,
then the universe we have constructed - becomes
de-centered. Nietzsche uses language slip as a
base to move into the slip and shift of truth as a
whole: Truths are an illusion about which it has been
forgotten that they are illusions...
◼ The 2nd half of the 20th century, with its
World Wars, Holocaust and the advent of
new technologies, witnessed revolutionary
developments in literary theory that were to
undermine several of the established notions
of Western literary and cultural thought. The
most prominent of them was
Poststructuralism, with its watchword of
“deconstructive reading”
◼ The theory, launched in Derrida’s paper
“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences” (1966), which he
presented at Johns Hopkins University, had
its roots in philosophy, especially in Martin
Heidegger’s concept of “Destruktion”. Derrida
was also influenced by Nietzsche, Freud and
Marx, each of whom brought about
revolutionary ways of thinking in their
respective disciplines.
◼ Derrida attacked the systematic and quasi-
scientific pretensions of structuralism —
derived from Saussurean Structural
Linguistics and Strauss’ Structural
Anthropology — which presupposes a centre
that organises and regulates the structure
and yet “escapes structurality”.
◼ Foucault, Barthes and Lacan undertook in
diverse ways to decentre/ undermine the
traditional claims for the existence of a self-
evident foundation that guarantees the
validity of knowledge and truth.
◼ This anti-foundationalism and scepticism
about the traditional concepts of meaning,
knowledge, truth and subjectivity also found
radical expression in Marxism (Althusser),
Feminisms (Butler, Cixous, Kristeva), New
Historicism (Greenblatt) and Reader
Response theory (Iser, Bloom and others).
Poststructuralism

◼ emphasised the indeterminate and polysemic

nature of semiotic codes and the arbitrary
and constructed nature of the foundations of
knowledge. originating in a politically volatile
climate, it laid stress on the operations of
ideology and power on human subjectivity. In
deconstructionist thought, the connection
between thought / reality, subject /object, self
/other are viewed as linguistic terms, and not
as pre-existent to language.
◼ With the famous statement “there is nothing
outside the text”, Derrida established the
provisionality and constructedness of reality,
identity and human subjectivity.
◼ Undermining “logocentricism” as the
“metaphysics of presence” that has ever
pervaded Western philosophy and cultural
thought, Derrida proposed the concept of
“ecriture”, which is beyond logos, and
characterised by absence and difference,
where there is free play of signifiers, without
ever arriving at the “transcendental signified”,
where meanings are locked in aporias and
can be located only in traces.
Aporia

◼ “an impasse”, a knot or an inherent

contradiction found in any text, an
insuperable deadlock, or “double bind” of
incompatible or contradictory meanings which
are “undecidable”.
◼ Derrida, cites the inherent contradictions at
work in Rousseau’s use of the words “culture”
and “nature” by demonstrating that
Rousseau’s sense of the self’s innocence (in
nature) is already corrupted by the concept of
culture (and existence) and vice-versa.
◼ Miller has also described the paradoxes that
afflict notions like giving, hospitality, forgiving
and mourning. He argues that the condition
of their possibility is also, and at once, the
condition of their impossibility.
◼ Christopher Norris, in his widely discussed
book on Derrida, presents the pivotal feature
of deconstruction as “the seeking-out of those
aporias, blindspots or moments of self-
contradiction where “a text involuntarily
betrays the tension between rhetoric and
logic, between what it manifestly means to
say and what it is nonetheless constrained to
means”.
◼ To some critics, the concept of aporia
corresponds to William Empson’s seventh
type of verbal difficulty in literature, which
occurs when “there is an irreconciliable
conflict of meaning within the text.”
TIME FLIES LIKE AN ARROW

◼ Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow (adverb

clause) = Time passes quickly.
◼ Time (verb) flies (object) like an arrow (adverb
clause) = Get out your stopwatch and time the
speed of flies as you would time an arrow's flight.
◼ Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow (object) = Time
flies are fond of arrows (or at least of one particular
arrow).
Modernism

◼ Modernistic literature is the expression of the modern

era (1901-45). It tends to revolve around themes of
individuality, the randomness of life, mistrust of
government and religion and the disbelief in absolute
truth.
◼ Yeats
◼ Hopkins
◼ Joyce
◼ Eliot
◼ Woolf
Thinkers of the Time
◼ The most disruptive thinkers:
❑ Charles Darwin (Biology)

❑ Karl Marx (Political Science)

❑ Sigmund Freud (Psychology)

◼ Darwin:
❑ Theory of evolution by natural selection

❑ Notion: Human beings were driven by the same impulses as

"lower animals"
❑ Undermining

◼ Religious certainty of the general public

◼ Sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia
◼ Ennobling spirituality
Ferdinand De Saussure
(1857-1913)

Swiss linguist
widely considered as the 'father' of 20th-
century linguistics. Main work Course in
General Linguistics. Its central notion is that
language may be analyzed as a formal
system of differential elements
❑ linguistic sign
❑ signifier
❑ signified
❑ referent
James Frazer (1834-1841)

Scottish social anthropologist

influential in the early stages of the modern
studies of mythology and comparative
Religion. His most famous work, The Golden Bough
(1890), documents similar magical and religious beliefs
across the globe. He maintained that human belief
progressed through three stages:
❑ primitive magic
❑ religion
❑ science
Henri Bergson (1858-1941)

French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th

century, developed
the theory of duration
◼ time is mobile and incomplete
◼ For the individual, time speeds up or slows down
◼ to explore the real time we need to explore the inner life of man
◼ Duration is neither a unity nor a multiplicity
◼ Duration is ineffable
◼ it can only be shown indirectly through images
◼ Images can never reveal a complete picture of Duration
◼ Duration can only be grasped through intuition and imagination
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)

German philologist and

philosopher. His key ideas include
◼ Tragedy as an affirmation of life
◼ Eternal recurrence
◼ Reversal of Platonism
◼ Repudiation of Christianity
◼ Will to power (as the motivation that underlies
all human behavior)
Carl G. Jung (1875-1961)

Swiss psychiatrist, influential

thinker and the founder of analytical psychology
◼ He emphasized understanding the psyche through
exploring dreams, art mythology, world religion and
philosophy
◼ Developed the concept of collective unconscious, a sort
of cultural memory containing myths and beliefs of the
human race which work at a symbolical level
 Sigmund Freud (1856-1938)

Austrian psychologist and psychotherapist

◼ Discovered a new method to investigate
the mind through analysis of dreams and free associations
◼ Known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense
mechanism of repression
◼ Renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary
motivational energy of human life directed toward a wide variety
of objects
◼ Famous for his therapeutic techniques, including
❑ theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship
❑ value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires
William James (1842-1910)

Pioneering American psychologist and

philosopher
◼ was first to introduce the term stream of consciousness to
denote the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and
impressions that makes up our inner lives
Theory of emotions
◼ emotions feel different from other states of mind
◼ they have bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations
◼ different emotions feel different from one another because they
are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The Theory of General Relativity

◼ A metric theory of gravitation
◼ Einstein's equations link the geometry of a four-dimensional space-
time with the energy-momentum contained in that space-time
◼ Phenomena ascribed to the action of the force of gravity in classical
mechanics, correspond to inertial motion within a curved geometry of
spacetime
◼ The curvature is caused by the energy-momentum of matter
◼ Space-time tells matter how to move
◼ Matter tells space-time how to curve.
Max Plank (1858-1947)

Considered the founder of quantum

theory, and one of the most important
physicists of the twentieth century, he
discovered Quantum mechanics
❑ the study of the relationship between quanta and
elementary particles
❑ regarded as the most fundamental framework we
have for understanding and describing nature
The Aesthetics of Modernity

◼ Disjunctive
◼ Avant-garde
◼ Discordant
◼ interiority, perception, pyschology
◼ in visual arts – anti-representational,
formalist, experimental
◼ in music – atonality, graphic notation
◼ in drama – gritty, abrasive, scandalous
Modernism Realism

◼ Non-linear chronology • linear chronology

◼ Unreliable narrators • reliable narrators
◼ Typographical • typographically regular
experimentation • Regular syntax –
◼ Stream of consciousness • clear narrative voice
◼ Fragmentation • little concern with
interiority
◼ Lack of closure • closure, finality
• morality clear “God’s in His
◼ Moral ambiguity
Heaven / All’s right with the
world.” (Browning)
 Stylistic Features of Modernist Literature

◼ Marked pessimism: a clear rejection of the

optimism apparent in Victorian literature
◼ Common motif in Modernist fiction: an
alienated individual (a dysfunctional
individual) trying in vain to make sense of a
predominantly urban and fragmented society
◼ Absence of a central, heroic figure
◼ Collapsing narrative and narrator into a
collection of disjointed fragments and
overlapping voices
Formal Characteristics of Modernist Literature

◼ Free Verse
❑ Vers libre
❑ Styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or
rhyme
❑ Still recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns
of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be part
of a coherent whole
◼ Intertextuality
❑ Coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966
❑ Shaping texts' meanings by other texts
❑ Author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text
❑ Reader’s referencing of one text in reading another
 Thematic Features

◼ Intentional distortion of shapes

◼ Focus on form rather than meaning
◼ Breaking down of limitation of space and time
◼ Breakdown of social norms and cultural values
◼ Dislocation of meaning and sense from its
normal context
◼ Valorisation of the despairing individual in the
face of an unmanageable future
◼ Disillusionment
◼ Rejection of history and the substitution of a
mythical past
◼ Need to reflect on the complexity of modern
urban life
◼ Importance of the unconscious mind
◼ Interest in the primitive and non-western cultures
◼ Impossibility of an absolute interpretation of
reality
◼ Overwhelming technological changes
Picasso
Van Gogh “A pair of Shoes”

◼ A celebrated painting by the Dutch master

◼ 1886.
◼ Many philosophers and art historians have
written about van Gogh’s painting of shoes,
including Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro,
and Jacques Derrida.
 Martin Heidegger

◼ Claimed that the pair of shoes is an

instrument created by men.
◼ The major reason the shoes witness the
world of a peasant woman is because they
have been extracted from that world and put
aside.
◼ The shoes the poor woman wears to work
outside become genuine carriers of the very
essence of her reality with daily habits,
fatigue and sour sweat. The peasant isn’t
here, yet we can perceive her clearly. Her
thoughts, hopes and fears for the future.
◼
◼ We could imagine the same peasant putting
the work shoes away to wear the good ones
for a special day. The ugly shoes then
become silent witnesses of her world; she
knows her world stays here even when it’s
interrupted, and she feels secure.
◼ The only difference between the real shoes
and the painting of Van Gogh lies in the fact
that in the first case the shoes continue to be
a means (equipment) for they are usable
(even if put aside). It’s in the second case
that the shoes themselves become a work of
art revealing their essence
 Schapiro

◼ Schapiro spoke against Heidegger saying to

have gone too far with his imagination,
because the shoes belong to Van Gogh
himself. This is why the artist had painted a
object in which he identifies himself or which
helps him reveal his creative inner urge.
◼ Acting as a mirror, the painting reflects the
metaphorical wrinkles and is tired and worn
out just like the person behind it.
◼ Hence, given the inevitable subjectivity that
spreads into the artwork, it is impossible
for the depicted object to embrace some
other essence and to represent some other
world
 Derrida

◼ Criticized both Schapiro and Heidegger as

too biased
◼ According to Derrida, Schapiro positions
himself in a limited art critic prospective and
automatically attaches the artwork to the
artist. Meanwhile, Heidegger by all means
tries to cut it out from any possible
connotations and yet associates it to a
peasant woman!
◼ He stated that the shoes are not even a pair
and cannot be proven to be those of a
peasant nor of a city-dweller. Derrida
questioned what constitutes a pair of shoes
and how the elements of such combine
different forms of reality.
◼ Derrida supposed that the interpretations of A
Pair of Shoes by Heidegger and Schapiro
point to their respective standpoints rather
than to the artwork itself as Schapiro himself
was a city-dweller and Heidegger supported
the peasant ideology.
◼ Schapiro, Derrida upheld, was overly
attached to representational thinking thereby
weakening his argument. To Derrida, it is
more important to understand that which
surrounds the artwork rather than the
essence or nature of the artwork.
◼ Each scholar, critic, and collector has a
lexicon of signs and symbols to draw upon
and contend with which do not necessarily
corroborate with the iconology of the artist. It
is crucial to understand that form and context
are not the only factors at work when
examining art. The scholars themselves
possess conscious or unconscious biases
which affect how they interpret art.
◼
◼ Derrida argued that when examining art, one
must take a self-critical stance and
incorporate many avenues of exploration. A
combination of this careful, deconstructionist
methodology and an objective lens will allow
for a true comprehension of art.
Postmodernism: Definition

◼ Coined in 1949

◼ To describe a dissatisfaction with modern

architecture, founding the postmodern
architecture

◼ Any of several movements (as in art,

architecture, or literature) reacting against the
philosophy and practices of modern movements
Postmodernism

◼ Fragmentation, paradox, fallible narrators.

◼ Unifying features often coincide with Lyotard's concept
of the "metanarrative" Derrida's concept of "play",
and Baudrillard's "simulacra." Instead of the
modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the
postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the
possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is
often a parody of this quest
Postmodernist Literature: Overview

◼ After World War II

◼ A series of reactions against the perceived
failure
◼ Extension of modernist literature
◼ Reaction against modernism
Modernism Vs
Postmodernism: Poems
❑ In Modernist thought : A problem that must be
solved, and the artist often cited as the one to
solve it
❑ Postmodernists: this chaos is insurmountable; the
artist is impotent, and the only recourse against
"ruin" is to play within the chaos.
❑ Playfulness becomes central and the actual
achievement of order and meaning becomes
unlikely
Common Themes & Techniques

◼ Pastiche
❑ To combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements.
❑ An homage to or a parody of past styles
❑ A representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-
drenched aspects of postmodern society
❑ A combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or
to comment on situations in postmodernity
❑ William S. Burroughs: science fiction, detective fiction, westerns
❑ Margaret Atwood: science fiction and fairy tales
Common Themes & Techniques

❑ Broader pastiche of the postmodern novel: Metafiction and

temporal distortion
❑ The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1977): Mixture of
historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon
interacting with historical figures and fictional characters
such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker.
❑ Pastiche is a compositional technique: the cut-up
technique.
❑ The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson (1969): released in a
box with no binding for readers to assemble how ever they
chose.
Common Themes & Techniques

◼ Metafiction
❑ Writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus"
❑ Making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction
apparent to the reader
❑ Generally disregards the necessity for “willful
suspension of disbelief”
❑ To undermine the authority of the author, for
unexpected narrative shifts
❑ To advance a story in a unique way, for emotional
distance
❑ To comment on the act of storytelling
Common Themes & Techniques

❑ If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

(1979): a reader attempting to read a novel of the
same name
❑ Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969): the
first chapter - about the process of writing the
novel
Common Themes & Techniques

◼ Temporal distortion
❑ Central features: Fragmentation and non-linear
narratives
❑ Temporal distortion for the sake of irony
❑ Example: Historiographic metafiction
❑ Distortions in time in Kurt Vonnegut’s non-linear
novels: Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five coming
"unstuck in time“
Common Themes & Techniques

❑ Anachronisms: Abraham Lincoln using a telephone In

his flight to Canada (Ishmael Reed)
❑ Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into
multiple possibilities.
❑ "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants by
Robert Coover: Multiple possible events occurring
simultaneously -- in one section the babysitter is
murdered while in another section nothing happens
and so on
Common Themes & Techniques

◼ Technoculture and hyperreality

❑ Fredric Jameson: “society has moved past the
industrial age and into the information age”.
❑ Jean Baudrillard: postmodernity was defined by a shift
into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced
the real.
❑ People are inundated with information
❑ Technology as a central focus in many lives
Common Themes & Techniques

❑ Our understanding of the real is mediated by

simulations of the real
❑ Characteristic irony and pastiche
◼ White Noise by Don DeLillo: characters who are
bombarded with a “white noise” of television, product
brand names, and clichés
◼ The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, Neal
Stephenson
Common Themes & Techniques

◼ Paranoia
❑ The belief that there is an ordering system behind the
chaos of the world
❑ Postmodernist: no ordering system exists, so a search for
order is fruitless and absurd.
❑ Often coincides with the theme of technoculture and
hyperreality.
❑ Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut: the character
Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he is convinced
that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only
human
Common Themes & Techniques
◼ Maximalism
❑ a term used in literature, art multimedia and graphical
design, and music
❑ to explain a movement by encompassing all factors
under a multi-purpose umbrella term like
expressionism
To describe the extensive way of writing post-modern
novels
❑ Digression, reference, and elaboration of detail

❑ Also described as hysterical realism (similar to

magical realis) coined by James Wood
 Typical Questions:

◼ How is language thrown into free play in the work?

◼ How does the work undermine or contradict
generally accepted truths?
◼ How does the author (or a character) omit, change,
or reconstruct memory and identity?
◼ How does a work fulfill or move outside the
established conventions of its genre?
◼ How does the work deal with the separation (or lack
thereof) between writer, work, and reader?
◼ What ideology does the text seem to promote?
New Historicism, Cultural Studies
1980s
◼ Michel Foucault
◼ Clifford Geertz
◼ Hayden White
◼ Stephen Greenblatt
◼ Pierre Bourdieu
◼ This school, influenced by structuralist and post-
structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with
the time period in which it was produced .
◼ New Historicism assumes that every work is a
product of the historic moment that created it. New
Historicism is ”.a practice that has developed out of
contemporary theory, particularly the structuralist
realization that all human systems are symbolic and
subject to the rules of language, and the
deconstructive realization that there is no way of
positioning oneself as an observer outside the
closed circle of textuality"
◼ Traditional historians ask, 'What happened?'
and 'What does the event tell us about
history?' In contrast, New Historicists ask,
'How has the event been interpreted?' and
'What do the interpretations tell us about the
interpreters?
◼ So New Historicism resists the notion that
history is a series of events that have a linear,
causal relationship
◼ “The historicity of the text and the textuality of history.”
Stephen Greenblatt.

◼ A method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-

literary texts, usually of the same time period. It refuses to
privilege literary text.

literature is not foregrounded nor is history the background

◼ A historical anecdote is given, relating the text to the time.

◼ Context is replaced by “co-text”, that is an interrelated non-

literary text from the same time period.
 Foucault and New Historicism

◼ New Historicism is anti-establishment

◼ Michel Foucault’s idea of an all-seeing—

panoptic—surveillance State.
◼ The panoptic state exerts power through
discursive practices, circulating ideology
through the body-politic.
 Cultural Materialism
◼ Coined by Raymond Williams :
◼ Historical Context: what was happening at the time the text was
written.
◼ Political Commitment: Incorporating non-conservative
frameworks such as Feminist and Marxist theory.
◼ Textual Analysis: building on theoretical analysis of mainly
canonical texts that have become “prominent cultural icons.”

◼ Culture in this sense does not limit itself to “high culture” but
includes all forms of culture like TV and pop music.
◼ Materialism is at odds with idealism. Idealists believe in the
transcendent ability of ideas while materialist believe that culture
cannot transcend its material trappings.
Differences Between New Historicism
and Cultural Materialism
1. Cultural Materialists concentrate on the interventions whereby
men and women make their own history, New Historicists focus
on the power of social and ideological structures which restrain
them. A contrast between political optimism and political
pessimism.
2. Cultural Materialists view New Historicists as cutting
themselves off from political positions by accepting a version
of post-structuralism.
3.
New Historicists situate the literary text in the political situation
of its own day Cultural Materialists situate it within that of our
own.
 Typical Questions

◼ What language/characters/events present in the

work reflect the current events of the author’s day?
◼ Are there words in the text that have changed their
meaning from the time of the writing?
◼ How does this portrayal criticize the leading political
figures or movements of the day?
◼ How does the literary text function as part of a
continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the
same period...?
◼ How does the work consider traditionally
marginalized populations?
Post-Colonial Criticism 1990s

◼ Edward Said
◼ Kamau Braithwaite
◼ Gayatri Spivak
◼ Dominick LaCapra
◼ Homi Bhabha
◼ Post-colonial critics are concerned with
literature produced by colonial powers and
works produced by those who were/are
colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at
issues of power, economics, politics, religion,
and culture and how these elements work in
relation to colonial hegemony
◼ It questions the role of the western literary
canon and western history as dominant forms
of knowledge making. This critique includes
the literary canon and histories written from
the perspective of first-world cultures.
 Typical Questions

◼ How does the literary text, represent various aspects

of colonial oppression?
◼ How does the text treat post-colonial identity,
including the relationship between personal and
cultural identity and such issues as double
consciousness and hybridity?
◼ What person(s) or groups does the work identify as
"other" or stranger?
◼ How does a literary text in the Western canon
reinforce or colonialist ideology ?
Feminist Criticism 1960s

◼ Mary Wollstonecraft
◼ Simone de Beauvoir
◼ Julia Kristeva
◼ Elaine Showalter
◼ Deborah E. McDowell
◼ Alice Walker
◼ Lillian S. Robinson
◼ Camile Paglia -
Common concerns

◼ Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically,

socially, and psychologically
◼ All of western civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideology
◼ While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture
determines our gender (masculine or feminine)
◼ All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism,
has as its ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender
equality
◼ Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production
and experience, including the production and experience of
literature, whether we are consciously aware of these issues or
not.
◼ First Wave Feminism - late 1700s-early 1900's:
writers like Mary Wollstonecraft highlight the
inequalities between the sexes.
◼ Women's suffrage movement, which leads to
National Universal Suffrage in 1920
◼ Second Wave Feminism - early 1960s-late
1970s: building on more equal working conditions
necessary in America during World War II. Simone
de Beauvoir and Elaine Showalter established the
groundwork for the dissemination of feminist
theories
◼ Third Wave Feminism - early 1990s-
present: resisting the perceived essentialist
ideologies and a white, heterosexual, middle
class focus of second wave feminis.
◼ It borrows from post-structural and
contemporary gender and race theories
Typical questions:

◼ What are the power relationships between men and women (or
characters assuming male/female roles)?
◼ Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so?
How does this change others’ reactions to them?
◼ What does the work reveal about the operations (economically,
politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
◼ What does the work say about women's creativity?
◼ What does the history of the work's reception by the public and
by the critics tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
Gender Studies and Queer Theory
1970s
◼ Luce Irigaray
◼ Hélène Cixous
◼ Laura Mulvey
◼ Michele Foucault
◼ Eve Kosofsky
◼ Lee Edelman
◼ Michael Warner
◼ Judith Butler
◼ while influenced by feminist criticism it emerges
from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-
centered knowledge building and psychoanalysis.
◼ A primary concern in gender studies and queer
theory is the manner in which gender and sexuality
is discussed:
◼ A critic working in gender studies and queer theory
might be uncomfortable with the binary established
by many feminist scholars between masculine and
feminine
◼ Critics are interested in the breakdown of
binaries such as male and female, the in-
betweens.
◼ Gender studies and queer theory maintain
that cultural definitions of sexuality and what
it means to be male and female are in flux.
Typical questions:

◼ What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine

(active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how
do the characters support these traditional roles?
◼ What sort of support is given to elements or characters who
question the masculine/feminine binary?
◼ What elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?
◼ What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay,
lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed
in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?
◼ What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a specific
lesbian, gay, or queer works?
 Diaspora Criticism

◼ Diaspeir is Greek for `scattering' (speir) and

was originally employed to explain the
botanical phenomenon of seed dispersal.
◼ Transnational temporality
◼ Pre-modern or classical `ethnodiasporas'
Jews, Greeks and Armenians
◼ The large-scale dispersal of significant ethnic
clusters, or what Arjun Appadurai terms
`ethnoscapes'
◼ girmit, a term collectively assigned to the
atemporal ontology of suffering, hardship and
deceit in the plantations.(one of the reasons
of relocation)
◼ There are 3 distinct historical moments of
diasporic social formations:
◼ The classical or pre-modern,
◼ The (early) modern
◼ The late (post) modern.
◼ Border communities, diasporas are not
necessarily attached to or detached from
macrocosmic centres of homeland and host
land; they may create microcosmic alliances
by attending to `cultural forms, kinship
relations business circuits' or by attaching
themselves to religious institutions.
◼ Bourgeois nation-state and its troubled
relations with diasporic groups and practices,
is as symptomatic of global capital, has
preoccupied many diasporists.
◼ Nation state : Those with shared history and
cultural identity
 Chaos Theory

◼ The first real experiment in the chaos theory

was done in 1960 by a meteorologist, Edward
Lorenz. He was working with a system of
equations to predict what the weather would
likely be.
◼ Chaos theory was devised to deal with the
dynamics of non-linear systems . They are
found to be highly sensitive to even very
small fluctuations in their initial conditions: the
famous `butterfly effect', whereby the beating
of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world
could, theoretically, be responsible for the
formation of a hurricane thousands of miles
away.
◼ Only if an observer knew what the starting
conditions of a chaotic system were would he
be able to make a prediction.
◼ In chaotic systems randomness and
determinism are simultaneously present,
which leads to the counter-intuitive
conclusion that they are simultaneously
predictable and unpredictable in their
operation.
Thought experiments in quantum
mechanics
Schroedinger envisaged a cat incarcerated in a
box with a flask of cyanide gas. The box also
contains a radioactive source and a geiger
counter that can trigger a hammer to smash
the flask if a nucleus decays. It is then
possible to imagine the quantum state of a
nucleus to be such that after, say, one
minute, it is in a superposition corresponding
to a probability of one-half that decay has
occurred and one-half that it has not.
If the entire box contents, including the cat, are
treated as a single quantum system, we are
forced to conclude that the cat is also in a
superposition of two states: dead and alive.
In other words, the cat is apparently hung up
in a hybrid state of unreality in which it is
somehow both dead and alive!
◼ The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot said
that we cannot even measure a section of
the coastline accurately . As we go down to
greater and greater levels of magnification we
find self-similar patterns being repeated
endlessly in fractal form:
He found that as the scale of measurement
becomes smaller, the measured length of a
coastline rises without limit, bays and
peninsulas revealing smaller sub bays and
sub peninsulas down to atomic scales,
where the process perhaps finally come to an
end. Total understanding of the system
eludes us. We have only a rough
approximation of natural systems.
◼ We gain this rough approximation by the
unreliable art of measuring, but a further
problem arises than the one identified by
Mandelbrot that the very act of measurement
alters the system we are dealing with, leading
to what has been called the `collapse' of the
wave function:
◼ Although the microworld is inherently
nebulous, and only probabilities can be
predicted from the wave function, never-
theless when an actual measurement of
some dynamical variable is made a concrete
result is obtained.
◼ Natural systems (ex. the weather) are
controlled by mysterious forces, called
`strange attractors', such that they are
simultaneously random and determined
◼ Strange attractors dictate what happens
within each system. Strange attractors are
`the trajectory toward which all other
trajectories converge', they are inexorable in
their operation
◼Lyotard : All that exists are ``islands of
determinism''. Catastrophic antagonism is
literally the rule, indicates how fundamental
an adjustment to our world-view is being
asked for by the new physics
How much control do we have over our
destiny, or environment?
Neither islands of determinism nor catastrophic
antagonism constitute particularly congenial
locations for the exercise of free will.
◼ It problematizes the classical Marxist
conceptions of the nature of the dialectic and
materialism.
◼ The act of measurement thus transforms
probability into certainty by projecting out or
selecting a specific result from among a
range of possibilities
◼ This projection brings about an abrupt
alteration in the form of the wave function,
often referred to as its `collapse', which
drastically affects its subsequent evolution
◼ The system is therefore capable of changing
with time in two completely different ways;
one when nobody is looking and one when
and one when it is being observed.
 COMPLEXITY THEORY

◼ Complexity carries chaos theory to a new

pitch of sophistication, and emphasizes the
process of self-organization within systems.
Systems are seen to have the ability, at
critical points in their development (the edge
of chaos), quite spontaneously to self-
organize themselves to a higher level of
operational complexity.
The edge of chaos is where systems are at
their most creative as well as most
unpredictable. Where information gets the
upper hand over energy. Being at the
transition point between order and chaos not
only buys you exquisite control small
input/big change but it also buys you the
possibility that information processing can
become an important part of the dynamics of
the system
Chaos and complexity pose questions of
personal identity and its attendant problem of
free will. On the one hand, given the
coexistence of opposed states (random plus
determined) within systems, it suggests that
this is even less of a unity than we might
have thought, while on the other it raises the
spectre of spontaneous self-organization
cutting across human endeavour, rendering
freewill more than somewhat notional.
 TYPICAL QUESTIONS

◼ We do not experience the subatomic level of

matter: how valid is it to make analogies
between this micro-world and the macro-
world of which we do have direct experience?
◼ Is the belief that women are more in tune
with the natural world (including its physics)
than men are true?
◼ What scope can there be for free will in a
world governed by `deterministic chaos'?
The New Physics and Marxism

Marxism depends on a conception of the

dialectic as something whose trajectory can
be manipulated by those who understand its
underlying pattern.The party can assume
that, at some historically determinable point,
capitalism will collapse under the weight of its
own ideological contradictions and then pan
towards the revolutionary situation that will
inevitably occur in the aftermath.
◼ The dialectic is held to be a process
operating within the material world .
◼ Later Marxists have been critical of this view
of the dialectic as a positive phenomenon,
with Theodor W. Adorno putting forward his
theory of `negative dialectics' to counter the
official Marxist interpretation.
◼ Negative dialectics regards difference as a
constant element of the dialectical process,
such that it can never really be relied on by
the Marxist theorist, for whom it is assumed
to have a predictable trajectory. The continual
creation of contradictions undermines the
concept of identity in Adorno's view.
The notion of the edge of chaos has interesting
implications for Marxist theory. At the point
when a system is on the verge of collapsing
under the weight of its own contradictions it
would seem to be poised at the edge of
chaos. For Marxists this would be the point at
which capitalism, having created its antithesis
in a revolutionary-minded proletariat which
has grasped the fact of its exploitation by the
system is at its most vulnerable
when capitalism is potentially at its most
creative it may find ways to resolve the
situation to its own benefit and thus extend its
life-span. It could be argued that something
like this has indeed happened on several
occasions since Marx put forward the theory
of dialectical materialism, providing some
explanation as to why the final `crisis of
capitalism' that Marxism forecast has never
quite occurred
 ETHICAL CRITICISM

Finds its contemporary origins in the works of

Wayne C. Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum and
J. Hillis Miller.
◼ Questions about justice, about well- being
and social distribution, about moral realism
and relativism, about the nature of rationality,
about the concept of the person, about the
emotions and desires, about the role of luck
in human life are debated
Louise Rosenblatt identifies 2 types of reading
strategies
◼ Aesthetic reading: the reader devotes
particular attention to what occurs during the
actual reading even
◼ Non-aesthetic reading :the reader focuses
attention upon the traces of knowledge and
data that will remain after the event.
Rosenblatt designates non-aesthetic reading as
a kind of `efferent' reading in which readers
primarily interest themselves in what will be
derived materially from the experience
Efferent readers reflect upon the verbal
symbols in literature designate, what they may
be contributing to the end result, the guides
to action, that will be left with the reader when
the reading is over
According to John Gardner practitioners of
ethical criticism must invariably confront the
spectre of censorship, the human tendency to
instruct without regard for the plurality of
competing value systems at work in both the
theoretical realm of literary criticism and the
larger world of humankind. `Didacticism', he
cautions, `inevitably simplifies morality and
thus misses it'
TYPICAL QUESTIONS

◼ What historical issues might have led to the

academy's general interest in ethical issues
in the latter half of the twentieth century?
◼ How has the ethical turn impacted the
direction of literary criticism since the 1980s?
◼ What are the principal strengths of ethical
criticism as an interpretive paradigm?
◼ What seem to be its overall weaknesses as a
form of literary critique?
TRAUMA, TESTIMONY, CRITICISM

Trauma, can be described as a

`nonsymbolizable wound’ .To read trauma is
to register the sign of a secondary the return
of something spectral in the form of a trace or
sign signifying, but not representing directly,
that something, having occurred, has left its
mark, an inscription of sorts on the subject's
unconscious, and one which can and does
return repeatedly, though never as the
experience as such.
This is not to say that the traumatic event, that
factual or historical event which one day took
place, never happened or was not real. It is to
register that for trauma to be comprehended
as trauma, as that which, in appearing, inflicts
itself on the subject and thereby causes
suffering, is never experienced for the first
time as trauma.
The subject of trauma is rendered immobile,
unable to move beyond the haunting effects
left by trauma, and can only experience in a
damaging, repetitive fashion, the disjunctive
spectres, remains of what is
`nonsymbolizable‘. Paradoxically, the
phantasm is a symbol.The symbol is not a
mimetic representation, it is not an image of
the experience itself. It belongs to the order
of apperception rather than perception.
Slavoj Zizek :There is a link between the
notions of trauma and repetition signalled in
Freud's motto that what one is not able to
remember, one is condemned to repeat: a
trauma is something one is not able to
remember, i.e. to recollect by way of making
it part of one's symbolic narrative; as such, it
repeats itself indefinitely, returning to haunt
the subject .What repeats itself is the failure
to repeat/recollect the trauma properly.
◼ Walter Benjamin:”All documents of civilization
are also documents of barbarity.” Reading is
the act of bearing witness to literature's
memory work, where the reader must
respond must make impossible decisions, in
response to the attestation of impersonal
memory. And the responsibility entailed is
incalculable, for, in every act of witnessing,
every response to the other in its singularity, I
sacrifice countless others
◼ Cathy Caruth demonstrates a 2 part
disruptive structure in the nature of narrative
form in relation to trauma. This structure
allows for the articulation of the subject's act
of witnessing and responsibility involved in
acts of memory and witnessing through the
other's arrival which forces on the subject a
knowledge which had previously been
withheld.
The return of the other opens the subject's
complicity to him- or herself, not necessarily
as a specific guilt for a specific act, but as the
culpability, and the responsibility which that
entails, as a condition of Being, in which, as
beings, we all share, and which has itself to
be acknowledged
Testimonial criticism is to open to the reader
through a recognition of the other's
articulation a recognition that what Heidegger
calls the `call of conscience'
It is not simply always already in effect but
always remains to come.
Typical Questions

◼ Is trauma structured like a language?

◼ In what ways does the psychological concept
of trauma challenge conventional
understandings of historical event and
representation?
◼ If conventional acts of representation are
inadequate in their response to catastrophic h
events, what other modalities of
representation are available to us?
 Ecocriticism

◼ Most ecocritical work shares a common

motivation: the troubling awareness that we
have reached the age of environmental limits,
a time when the consequences of human
actions are damaging the planet's basic life
support systems. This awareness sparks a
sincere desire to contribute to environmental
restoration,
◼ Domination Model: “The anthropocentric vie
exemplified both by the pastoral and the
literature of territorial expansion humans
dominate the environment”
◼ Caretaking Model: anthropocentric,
positions humans as caretakers of the earth.”
◼ Biocentric Model: rejects anthropocentric
view explores the connectedness of all living
and nonliving things
◼ In addition to race, class, and gender, should
place become a new critical category?
◼ Do men write about nature differently than
women do?
◼ Has literacy affected humankind's
relationship to the natural world?
◼ In what ways is the environmental crisis
seeping into contemporary literature and
popular culture
According to Lawrence Buell (1995, 7±8), an
environmentally oriented work should display
the following characteristics:
◼ The nonhuman environment is present not
merely as a framing device but as a presence
that begins to suggest that human history is
implicated in natural history.
◼ The human interest is not understood to be
the only legitimate interest.
◼ Human accountability to the environment is
part of the text's ethical framework.
◼ Some sense of the environment as a process
rather than as a constant or a given is at least
implicit in the text.
Ecocritics ask questions like the following:
◼ How is nature represented in this sonnet?

◼ Are the values expressed in this play

consistent with ecological wisdom?
◼ How do our metaphors of the land influence
the way we treat it?
◼ How can we characterize nature writing as a
genre?
 SPATIAL CRITICISM
◼ Two thinkers who have contributed the most
to this revival of interest in the role of space
in the projects of western modernity are the
French social theorists, Henri Lefebvre and
Michel Foucault.
◼ Initially `Space was treated as the dead, the
fixed, the undialectical, the immobile, Time,
on the contrary, was richness, fecundity, life,
dialectic
◼ Space was treated as a stage or setting for
temporal events to unfold.
◼ Henri Lefebvre shows how the emergence
and development of capitalist modernity
occurs through a particular `(social)
production of (social) space' that is, a space
that is fundamentally produced by and
through human actions
Lefebvre develops a `concrete abstract'
tripartite model of space .He argues that any
socially produced historical space is
constituted by a dialectically interwoven
matrix of what he calls `spatial practices',
`representations of space' and `spaces of
representation', each allied with a specific
cognitive mode through which we `re-present'
it to ourselves
`Perceived', the `Conceived' and the `Lived'
◼ The Perceived pertains to the most abstract
processes of social production, reproduction,
cohesion and structuration, and hence bears
a striking resemblance to the concerns of the
various structuralisms whose `perceptual'
apparatus takes on the abstract conceptual
systematicity of a science.
◼ The 3rd term refers, to the space of the
embodied individual's cultural experience and
the signs and symbols that constitute it
◼ The 2nd term points towards what we
conventionally think as `space' proper,
drawing all three of the levels together into a
coherent ensemble. The space of scientists,
planners, urbanists, who identify what is lived
and what is perceived with what is conceived'
 Jameson’s Cognitive Mapping

◼ Mutations in space on all its levels have

created difficulties for us as individual and
collective subjects. `We do not yet possess
the perceptual equipment' to navigate and
position ourselves within this increasingly
urbanized and global social and cultural
space, our cognitive `organs' having been
developed in an earlier historical situation
◼ Jameson issues a call for a new kind of
`cognitive and pedagogical' cultural practice,
one which `will necessarily have to raise
spatial issues as its fundamental organizing
concern‘. It is this aesthetic practice which
Jameson names cognitive mapping: `a
pedagogical political culture which seeks to
endow the individual subject with some
heightened sense of its place in the global
system'
 Bhaktin’s Chronotopes

◼ Chronotope is defined as relativity of time

and space: “the intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature” He
employs the term chronotope, as Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity with time being the fourth
dimension of space
10 chronotopes

◼1. Greek Romance Adventure

Systematicity of time and space; both time and
space are interchangeable sequences of
events, that leave no trace on the hero; heros
travel through diverse geographic terrain and
encounter characters different from
themselves
2. Adventure of everyday life

◼ Mix of adventure-time with everyday time;

hero’s life sheathed in context of
metamorphosis of human identity brought
about by trial, and revelation in the public
space; type of metamorphosis is mythological
cycle of crisis, so person becomes other than
what she or he was by chance, accident or
trial
3. Biography & Autobiography Adventure

◼ (Auto) biographical time in analytic & stoic

sub-types; each subtype appeals to a circle
of readers, and like the first chronotope:
character-metamorphosis is excluded.
Historical time and spatial events are how a
character discovers hidden character traits
(that were there all along) & by laying one’s
life bare, illuminating it in the public domain
in self-glorification
4. Chivalric Romance, the Epic Adventure

◼ Hyperbolization of time with other-worldly

verticality (descent); this is strange mix of (1)
Greek Romance (2) Adventure novel of
everyday life; testing of heroes’ fidelity to
love or faith in chivalric code; fairy tale motifs
linked to identity & enchantment; chance (2)
of gods, fate, rupture time of normal life
5. Historical Reversal of Folkloric Realism

◼ An inversion to folkloric fullness of here-and-

now reality (folkloric realism) becomes
transformed by trips into past (or mythic
thought) to concretize otherwise ephemeral &
fragmented future
6. Rogue, Clown & Fool Folkloric Archetypes

◼ Out of depths of folklore pre-class structure

are three medieval masks; mix of (4) folkloric
& (2) everyday adventure & (3) public shared
theatrics & (5) chivalric romance; right to be
in the world and see falseness of every
situation; metamorphosis of being in life, but
not a part of it, making public the non-public
sphere, & laying bare conventionality of
feudal & institutional hypocritical in public
domain
7. Rabelaisian purge

◼ Rabelaisian Laughter has two phases (1)

purge of transcendent worldview; (2)
laughter of renewal to create a more positive
construction. It interacts with preceding
chronotopes romantic, false official ideology
& false chivalric code/epic/religious/feudal
using Rabelaisian laughter of the 3 masks &
grotesque realism, to reverse the folkloric
appropriation by modernity
8. Folkloric Basis for Rabelaisian

◼ Time is collective and part of productive

growth, generative time is pregnant time and
concrete here-and-now, a time sunk deeply in
the earth, profoundly spatial and concrete,
implanted in earth & ripening in it
(metamorphosis)
9. Idyllic Folkloric (organic
localism)
◼ Idyllic folkloric time, is agricultural and craft
labour, it is family organically grafted to time
events and spatiality (place), living
organically in familiar territory, in unity of
place; rhythm of life linked to nature & cyclic
repetition that is separated from progress
myth; not a stage of development; a rebirth;
the idyllic fragments & disintegrates with
advent of modernity
10. Castle Room Folkloric

◼ The place and time of telling, such as a

Castle Room, or a Salon, or a Fast Food
Restaurant is its own chronotope
TYPICAL QUESTIONS

◼ The impact of Lefebvre's tripartite schema of

space. Are there literary works that focus
upon the other two levels of space?
◼ In what ways have the situations of our world
transformed Bhaktin’s novelistic
chronotopes? Does the electronic
informational space produce new
chronotopes for the novel?
◼ What roles do space and spatial differences
play in the production of identities?
◼ How does an attention to these differences
shape how wethink about bodies?
◼ How does the attention to space enable a
different reading of the production of identity
itself?
 CYBERCRITICISM

◼ Cybercriticism is concerned with the

technology/virtuality and the body, analyses
of technology, the cultural readings of
technological tools and virtual communities.
As cyberculture changes, accelerated by the
intensification of technological development,
so too will cybercriticism.
◼ Cybercriticism emerged after the artificial
intelligence work of the Second World War .
But it was not until the World Wide Web
became a pervasive and tangible presence in
the mid 1990s that the field of `cybercriticism'
emerged in the academy,
◼ Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions of operators. A
graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines
of light ranged in the non space of the mind,
clusters and constellations of data.
 Cyberpunk Terms

◼ Hacker: one who successfully breaks into

computer systems/networksand can
manipulate them for his/her own use
◼ Cracker: one whose attempts to break into
computer systems/networks may not succeed
but whose attempts will impact upon those
systems;
◼ Phreak: one who attempts to break into
telephone systems;
◼ Cypher-punk: one who attempts to break
codes and to foil security systems
◼ Transhuman: one who attempts to exploit
technology to increase life expectancy and
human potential;
◼ Extropian: transhumanists with an ardent
interest in space colonization.
 TECHNOPOLY

◼ The deification of technology, which means

that culture seeks its authorization in
technology, finds its satisfactions in
technology, and takes its orders from
technology. This requires the development of
a new kind of social order.
 CYBORGS

◼ A transgressive mixture of biology and

technology. Cosmetic surgery and
bodybuilding form part of the discourse of the
cyborg, remodelling, removing and
regenerating the body.
 Jean Baudrillard

◼ The hyperreal
◼ A term associated with the effects of mass
culture reproduction, suggesting that an
object, event, experience so reproduced
replaces or is preferred to its original. that the
copy is 'more real than real'. Hyperreality is
associated especially with cultural tendencies
and a prevailing sensibility in contemporary
American society.
◼ Hyperreality is synonymous with the most
developed form of simulation: the
autonomous simulacra which is free from all
reference to the real. The Disneyland as 'a
perfect model of all the entangled orders of
simulation' Its function is to disguise the fact
that 'all of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
order of the hyperreal and simulation‘
 Simulacrum and Simulacra

◼ In postmodern culture society has become so

reliant on models and maps that we have lost
all contact with the real world that preceded
the map. Reality itself has begun merely to
imitate the model, which now precedes and
determines the real It is no longer a question
of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody.
It is a question of substituting the signs of the
real for the real”
◼ Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that
postmodern culture is artificial, because the
concept of artificiality still requires some
sense of reality against which to recognize
the artifice.
◼ His point is that we have lost all ability to
make sense of the distinction between nature
and artifice.
 SIMULACRUM

◼ A term describing the transformation of the

symbolic to the semiotic image
◼ A journey from reflecting reality to masking
reality to having no relation to reality
◼ The electronic media translates the symbolic
to the semiotic

◼ Ex: Reality TV, Documentaries

 3 Orders of Simulacra

◼ 1) the pre-modern period, the image is a

counterfeit of the real; the image is
recognized as just an illusion
◼ 2) The industrial revolution of the 19th
century, the distinctions between the image
and the representation begin to break due to
mass production which masks an underlying
reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening
to replace it (e.g.photography)
◼ In the 2nd order, there is still a belief that,
through critique or effective political action,
one can still access the hidden fact of the real
◼ 3) The postmodern age, we are confronted
with a precession of simulacra; that is, the
representation precedes and determines the
real. There is no longer any distinction
between reality and its representation; there
is only the simulacrum.
 The Delirious Spectacle of the Non Event

◼ There is no even in the media –only its

simulacrum
◼ No shared experience only individual viewers
isolated by their techonlogically mediated
experience
◼ The empathy felt towards Tsunami victims on
TV is no different from the empathy we feel
towards characters on Soaps
The Gulf War did not Take Place

◼ 1991 Operation Desert Storm is a non event

3 Reasons
◼ There was no declaration of War replaced by
UN mandated Right to War
◼ If the war was not declared it did not happen
◼ The western military excluded all contact “
annihilation the enemy from a distance. So
the war has not happened.
◼ The Western military’s overwhelming power
precluded any chance of Iraq’s victory.
◼ So if only one side has any chance of winning
Is it a war?
◼ As audience we witnessed a virtual war
feeling no empathy but a moral distancing in
the thrill of seeing the skyline of Bhagdad
being bombed as if in a video game
◼ Only 1 Iraqi victim was shown in Britain
 TYPICAL QUESTIONS

◼ Does the cyborg perpetuate gender

stereotypes?
◼ Does cyberspace dehistoricize and
departicularize the body?
 DELEUZEAN CRITICISM

◼ The relation, and difference, between

transcendent and transcendental is crucial in
Deleuze's philosophy. We may have
experiences within the world of this or that
transcendent or external object but
philosophy reflects upon how we see or know
anything at all.
◼ To think transcendentally requires, a
commitment to immanence. This is a refusal
to explain life by some outside or
transcendent plane; it is to think the power of
life on its own terms, without subordinating
life to an already existing image
There is not a transcendent real world outside
or beyond images and perceptions. Being is
perception. This does not mean that being is
a mental event. If we thought this then we
would still be grounding the world on some
privileged external point such as the mind,
brain or human perception.
Style enables the creation of a `we' and a
shared mode of speech. Deleuze writes of
literature's production of a `people to come':
`Health as literature, as writing, consists in
inventing a people who are missing. It is the
task of the fabulating function to invent a
people . The ultimate aim of literature is to set
free, in the delirium, this creation of a health
or this invention of a people, that is, ‘a
possibility of life'
 Rhizome

◼ Subterranean root-like stem emitting roots

and usually producing leaves at its apex

◼ Theory and research that allows for multiple,

non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data
representation and interpretation. They
oppose it to a concept of knowledge, which
works with dualist categories and binary
choices.
◼ "As a model for culture, the rhizome resists
the organizational structure which charts
causality along chronological lines and looks
for the original source of 'things' and looks
towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those
'things.‘
◼ A rhizome is characterized by 'ceaselessly
established connections between semiotic
chains, organizations of power, and
circumstances relative to the arts, sciences,
and social struggles.‘
◼ The rhizome presents history and culture as
an array of attractions and influences with no
specific origin a 'rhizome is always in the
middle, between things, interbeing.
"In this model, culture spreads like the surface
of a body of water, spreading towards
available spaces eroding what is in its way.
The surface can be interrupted and moved,
but these disturbances leave no trace, as the
water is charged with pressure and potential
to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby
establish smooth space.
 Spectral Criticism

◼Andrew Bennett Nicholas Royle, propose

`ghosts’ as an essential topos of the critical:
Ghosts are paradoxical since they are both
fundamental to the human, fundamentally
human, and a denial or disturbance of the
human, the very being of the inhuman
This scandal of the ghost, its paradoxy, is
embedded in the very thing that we call
literature
Renewed interest in Gothic writing

◼ What haunts Gothic is Gothic: a ghost

haunted by another ghost. 18th century
Gothic was haunted by Jacobean tragedy,
and Jacobean tragedy by the horrors of
Greek drama; and as all these textual
manifestations are themselves further
haunted by a world which comes prior to text
yet which we can know only in and through
text, a world of oral tradition (Punter)
Everything, then, begins in continues to reside
in an absence, a premonition of arrival which
will never be fully removed or replaced. Thus
◼ Derrida engages with the looping circularity of
history, whereby there is never an origin, a
state whereby the past refuses to be entirely
occluded but remains to haunt the apparent
site of enlightened new beginnings: in the
beginning apparently is the apparition.
◼ The narratives of history must necessarily
include ghosts but they will also be written by
ghosts.
◼ History is a series of accounts of the dead,
but it is also a series of accounts by the dead;
the voiceswe overhear in our dealings with
history are spectral they spectralize the
possibility of knowledge.
◼ This inevitably connects, through the notion
 In Psychoanalysis

◼ A psychic space different from the

unconscious, a location whose existence is
felt only as an insistent pressure from an
otherwise absent or unattributable source.
◼ This `crypt', the repository of the secrets of
the past, it is the place where the memories
of our ancestors are buried, the site on which
are stored all the stories which have been too
painful,too embarrassing, too revealing to tell;
◼ Spectral criticism offers a certain and deeply
uncertain humility in the face of the text, a
necessary opposition to the vaunted
possibilities of accurate historical
exhumation, a realization of the partiality of
all our efforts
◼ Our efforts to focus on the text are all but
destroyed before they have begun
 (A)MATERIAL CRITICISM

Reading is here conceived of actively as one

name for a site in which legacies are relayed,
constellations of `textual' events
reconfigured, hermeneutic regimes
reimprinted, or, alternately, where epistemo-
linguistic ruptures occur in which
reinscriptions become possible a moment to
which Benjamin will attach terms like `shock'
or `caesura'.
A `materiality' to which reading is directed, a
moment in the experience of memory and
sign systems that moves us from a mimetic
to a performative model of the text as virtual
or historical event
◼ May impact the identity of `literature' as an
institution. A broader translation of textual
legacies into the terms of technicity that may
dominate hybridizations of science and once
humanistic discourses.
THANK YOU